It's the money, stupid.
Wealth was always going to win this election—with or without Elon Musk.
In the end, billionaires won this election.
They were always going to, no matter who went to the White House. Vice President Kamala Harris had a younger, more diverse (and less … ebullient) array of the world’s wealthiest people in her corner—and none have the concentrated riches or wide-ranging influence of Elon Musk, the world’s wealthiest 14-year-old boy. But in terms of sheer numbers, Harris won over many more billionaire backers than once-and-future President Donald Trump.
Trump still beat her at the billionaire game. Now that Musk has triumphed in what Mother Jones named “the oligarch election,” the Tesla-Twitter-SpaceX owner will, somehow, gain even more power. (He’s already joining Trump’s phone calls with world leaders.) But this election’s outcome, and how it was shaped by wealth and its inequalities, goes far beyond Musk and his fellow one-percenters.
The common thread is money. Starting with James Carville’s decades-old maxim about “the economy, stupid”—even if “the economy” in this case was about vibes more than underlying data. It’s true that, under the recent Biden administration, the U.S. economy has gotten “strong”: inflation has cooled, wages are rising, unemployment remains low, and interest rates are coming down. It’s also true that, after years of pandemic-era price hikes and still-high mortgage rates, most voters weren’t feeling it.
This election was also about business, and the ever-growing influence corporate America wields on our electoral processes, and how much easier many companies and investors think it will be to make money under another Trump administration. As we saw in the stock markets’ record-setting reaction on Wednesday, hours after Trump secured another presidency.
Sure, there’s an element of short-term exuberance vs. long-term danger here. Many economists have warned that Trump’s proposed policies—tariffs, tax cuts, and mass deportations of the immigrants who still do many of the jobs Americans don’t want—will make inflation and the federal deficit much worse. (The poor bond markets, much less understood than the share price of Tesla or Coinbase, are sounding this alarm already.)
But these are problems for another day. And to be fair, whatever else history says about the first Trump administration and its long-term impacts on our country: The stock market did go up during it.
This election was also about more than money, of course. But whatever its outcome did or didn’t say about our democracy and our country and our society; or about the individual candidates, and their policies and their track records and how they chose to run their campaigns; or about how we view race and gender, and how much (if at all) we value women … money seemed to trump it all.
Lady Bits
“Americans have taken it for granted for generations that milk is cheap and plentiful. Few of them realize that the current political climate around the issue of undocumented immigrants could put that longstanding privilege in danger.” I linked to it above, but this New York Times Magazine story about what mass deportations could mean for our dairy supply—and the cost of our groceries—is fantastic and sobering.
“The White House doesn’t like the vice president enough to stick her in the back of group photos.” And the prize for most prescient writing goes to (the rushed but compulsively watchable and excellently acted) season two of The Diplomat!